Historical Painting Techniques, Materials, and Studio Practice

artist like Vermeer had to use all his ingenuity ... to achieve ... ," Swill ens
published his first detailed study of the paintings in 1929. Swillens concluded
that Vermeer had painted his oeuvre in five different rooms, all thoroughly
recorded (12, 13). In another publication on Vermeer in 1950, he further
elaborated his views on Vermeer's use of spatial illusion and his realistic recording
of space (14). Swillens illustrated how Vermeer depicted his interiors
with great accuracy. The position or eye level of the artist was established
and thus the height of Vermeer himself and of the chair on which he almost
always sat when painting. The work of Swillens, and belief that Vermeer
rendered what he actually saw in front of him, has had a major influence on
the scholarly research on Vermeer.
Even in the 1940s, Hyatt Mayor records that highlights in the foreground in
some of Vermeer's paintings "break up into dots like globules of halation
swimming on a ground glass," and a few years later Gowing reached the
conclusion that Vermeer had used a camera obscura (15, 16).
In his studies, Seymour continues with this thought, which, apart from halation
around highlights, he based on specific phenomena in the paintings,
such as the diffusion of the contours (17). He also found that the perspective
in certain paintings resembled the distortion obtained when using a wideangle
lens.
Prompted by Seymour's article, Schwarz fu rther suggested that Vermeer may
have used the camera obscura as a technical aid in his painting process (18).
Bearing testimony to Vermeer's use of technical devices for rendering his
images, wrote Schwarz, is the fact that the mathematician and physicist Balthasar
de Monconys (1611-1665) attempted to visit Vermeer during his stay
in Delft in 1663, and that a friendship probably existed between Vermeer and
fellow townsman Anthony van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723), a specialist in
microscopes and lenses.
There is a tendency to consider mathematicians otherwise uninvolved in the
creation of visual arts as responsible for developing an intellectual interest in
perspective. However, this view was probably not shared by the artists, who,
fo r their part, were using the simplest and at the same time most convincing
methods to create their spatial illusions. We are therefore entitled to believe
that, as de Monconys was also an art collector, it would be much more likely
that he wanted to pay Vermeer a visit in order to see his renowned paintings
or perspectives (19). Vermeer was also the Headman of the Guild of St. Luke
at the time, and he would naturally be the person for an art collector to see
when visiting the town.
In 1968 Mocquot suggested that Vermeer might have used double mirrors
to create his perspectives, both in his Allegory of Painting and in The Concert
(20, 21, 22).
Finck claimed in 1971 to be able to prove that twenty-seven paintings by
Vermeer must have been made with the aid of a camera obscura (23). The
arguments presented here will make it clear that this highly ambitious thesis
has no basis in reality.
Wheelock undertook the most detailed study of the optics and perspectives
used by Delft painters around 1650 (24). It is argued that some of Vermeer's
pictures (although far fewer than is asserted by Finck) do indeed have many
effects similar to that which can be achieved using lenses or a camera obscura,
and therefore the use of these devices seems highly probable. Wheelock does
make clear, however, that the use of a camera obscura would be extremely
difficult indoors because the light levels were generally insufficient to obtain
an image. In more recent publications, Wheelock increasingly argues that
Vermeer probably did not trace images seen through a camera obscura, but
that he must have been aware of the device and used certain special effects
seen through it for his paintings.
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